Georgina McWhirter
I loved you the moment I saw you, by Peter Black, with an essay by Ian Wedde (VUP, Wellington, 2011), 100 pp., $60.00.
Photographer Peter Black understands that every moment counts, that there’s nothing too small to matter, and that what perhaps matters most is those in-between moments — the ones occurring before and after the taken photograph. Captured in the frames of his new photo-book, I loved you the moment I saw you, are glimpses of humanity which gain poignancy from their very ordinariness. And Black’s eye always spots the serendipities. A businessman’s hands gesture vividly in a café, as if somehow recharging the glass of nearly finished latte at his side. A loved-up thirty-something couple nuzzle affectionately by a sign for a parking infringement office. A young man panhandles, framed by two BNZ ATMs, his baseball cap held like a cup. A blind person’s walking cane feels out the yellow domes of tactile paving. An overweight man in a wheelchair propels himself past posters of male fashion models; they seem to mock him. ‘HOMELESS PLEASE I NEED YOU…’ reads the cardboard sign balanced against a man’s ankles as he sits slumped on the pavement, while in the neighbouring photo, men in expensive suits burst into animated chatter outside National Bank, as if recognising a mutual comfort zone.
The emotional life of the protagonists ebbs and flows across the photos — pulsing with the electric gaze of lovers, sinking into repose with the glazed-eyed boredom of an office drone. A man walks across an empty street, past a billboard of a woman’s face blown-up to uncanny, larger-than-life proportions, and we feel the alienation of modern life. A kid throws a tantrum; a uni graduate is congratulated; coffees are consumed; cigarettes are rolled; the buzz of life goes on.
The emotional life of the protagonists ebbs and flows across the photos — pulsing with the electric gaze of lovers, sinking into repose with the glazed-eyed boredom of an office drone. A man walks across an empty street, past a billboard of a woman’s face blown-up to uncanny, larger-than-life proportions, and we feel the alienation of modern life. A kid throws a tantrum; a uni graduate is congratulated; coffees are consumed; cigarettes are rolled; the buzz of life goes on.
What are they thinking, these urban zombies lost in rush hour in the hustle and bustle of work, these mall rats killing time in the streets, the beggar and the woman who hurries past the beggar, the teens taking pix with their cellphones? What draws you in is precisely the not knowing: the impossibility of ever being fully cognisant of the depths and vagaries of another’s rich interior life. It’s also part of the fun, imagining possible narratives. The people in the snapshots become characters in a story; each photo possesses its own tiny drama.
The photos are bookended by two related shots. At the beginning, a man sets a sleeping baby in an infant carrier on the footpath while waiting at a crossing. The final image of the book takes place mere seconds later: the man picks the carrier up – the baby is awake, looking at him. The result is effective: one gets the impression of a microcosm of New Zealand glimpsed in the blink of an eye (or the click of a shutter).
With their razor-sharp depth of field, the images deem everything in the frame of equal importance, in keeping with the egalitarian spirit of social documentary photography. Black often holds the camera in front of him at elbow height, away from the eye, in the classic ‘shoot from the hip’ style used by many street photographers in order to limit the intrusiveness of the camera. In this way he avoids making judgments on what is ‘fit’ or ‘not fit’ to be photographed. The ‘shoot from the hip’ technique results in occasionally odd angles that both add movement to the frame and give rise to perspectives that reveal a different view on the world – looking up with wonder more often than looking down with omniscience. In his series ‘Moving Pictures’ from 1990, Black shot from a moving car and here he retains that cinematic sense of movement and the split-second seizing of the moment. They might remind you of the breathlessness of a David Eggleton poem, or of a French New Wave film, with images flying by. Other shots are more obviously composed and clearly not accidental. Whichever mode is being employed one thing is clear: an auteur’s hand is in control.
In Sport 30 (devoted entirely to Black’s work) Gregory O’Brien notes that in Peter’s darkroom hangs a quote from Goethe: ‘Presence is our duty, be it only for a moment’. And that is the gift of this book: to compel us to see, really see, what our eyes are inclined to gloss over in the everyday.
The photographs in this series were taken on Black’s habitual routes around inner Wellington circa 2010, and feature people on their own well-worn tracks around town, engaged in the ‘getting somewhere’: the in-between times – waiting at traffic lights, snatching lunch-breaks, pounding pavement, head down, blinkers on. Perhaps in this spatial loop about town we might see a response to the discursive loop of images of ‘national identity’ fed to us by popular media (the jandals, buzzy bees, beach bachs, and so on, found in almost any bank, airline or L&P commercial). Black’s photographs establish a more accurate sense of a New Zealand vernacular than that homogenised ready-to-eat identity manufactured for us by corporates.
It is those on the margins of society, usually rendered invisible, who are most clearly ‘spoken for’ in these images. The rampant consumerism of the present is juxtaposed with the abject poverty of those whom society has let fall through the cracks. There’s an almost painfully lucid disjunction between the haves and have-nots. An alcoholic drinks behind a bus stop shelter, next to a Lotto sign. Three men in pinstriped suits huddle on the streets, their heads out of the frame – literally and metaphorically designated ‘faceless corporate types’. It could be a film still straight out of Citizen Kane, if it weren’t for the richly rendered colour (and Dymocks edging into the background).
Black has an almost Douglas Sirkian, cinemascopic eye for colour – his hues are as bright and glossy as those of the brochures he is satirising. The front of the dustjacket has the look of a comic book frame come to life. It’s a tight crop on one of the first photographs in the book, a slipping glimpse of torsos that’s all motion and angles – the swing of hips and arms of a teenage couple striding down the footpath, fingers intertwined. Spencer Levine, last year shortlisted for the Young Designer of the Year award, has created this arresting cover: the lemon-coloured lower-case scrawl emblazoned over Black’s image simultaneously recalls anonymous street graffiti, the personal touch of the handwritten, and the speech balloons in Roy Lichtenstein’s pop art paintings.
Yes, Black makes ‘moving pictures’: photographs that move the viewer, that pulse and fizz with movement, that capture the passing moment — a moment on the move. Blink, and the moment’s gone – unless, of course, we were lucky, and Peter Black was there.
GEORGINA MCWHIRTER is a twenty-something Aucklander-turned-Dunedinite. She is editor at Otago University Press and has an MA (Hons) in film and media studies.
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